Tim Sanders: Expanded desal plan unwise

Should existing Monterey Peninsula water users pay a surcharge on their future water bills in order to support increased desalination for expanded Peninsula development?

The money collected from existing customers would provide a significant discount to users of the new water. This transfer of costs would occur under the Coalition of Peninsula Businesses' proposal for an enlarged — essentially doubled — desalinization project (see The Herald, Dec. 1, 2012).

For existing consumers the surcharge probably would be on the order of 10 percent to 20 percent, and for growth users the corresponding discount would be between 21 percent and 33 percent. This subsidy, from non-growth water users to growth consumers, would be permanent. It results from the relatively high cost of desalinization (not merely from "up-front" construction and financing costs), and from the customary practice of basing water bills on the volume of water supplied — in acre-feet, cubic feet or gallons, for example — rather than on the character of the water source, such as river water or desalination.

Only if the full costs of desalinization are charged for growth water, and only if these charges are enforced in perpetuity, could the partial shift of desalination costs from new development to existing consumers be avoided. Prospects for achieving that are extremely small, given the local record of legislation and enforcement on such restrictions.

Besides misallocation of costs, there are many additional reasons to not divert the Peninsula's desal planning goal away from strict replacement of reduced water sources. The planning is a belated and necessary response to past excesses in local growth and over-development, which has produced a large water deficit for the Peninsula. For a long time Cal Am and others effectively ignored the deficit, and simply over drafted the Carmel River and its associated aquifers. Under draconian state mandate, the Peninsula now must replace its over-drafted water source. Desalination is an unwelcome but necessary part of the replacement strategy.

Urgent replacement of a water resource — not gratuitous growth — has been and must remain the sole goal and mission of current water production efforts.

Large scale desal almost always is a sub-optimal resource, and almost always is used only when no other option is available. Not only is the existing technology very expensive to operate in direct economic terms, it also brings with it major externalities. The desal process is a glutton for electricity, which entails generating significant volumes of climate-altering greenhouse gasses, and increasing air pollution levels. Current plans do not incorporate substantial use of renewable energy that would mitigate these effects. Also, the necessary seawater extraction, brine discharge and freshwater-seawater interactions have serious effects that are already subjects of litigation. In addition, the direct linkage of the water supply to energy resources implicit in desalinization increases the risk of disruptions in water availability.

The proposed increase in development would further burden already overloaded infrastructure. Use of desal should be tailored to meet urgent needs and safety margins, not maximized to serve special interests.

The Coalition of Peninsula Businesses' proposal would aggravate the many already disruptive distractions and complications in the Peninsula's water restoration effort. It would increase substantially the prospects for misallocating project and operations costs, place unfair burdens on existing water consumers and produce significant adverse environmental effects.

Clearly, to expand the desal component of the Peninsula water-replacement project would be expensive and very unwise. The proposal of the Coalition of Peninsula Businesses is not in the public's interest and should be decisively rejected.

Tim Sanders, who lives in Carmel Valley, is a retired professor of physics and mathematics, former college administrator, and a continuing civic activist.